Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Monthly Archives: May 2016

“I have been in autism circles on the Internet for 10 years. I am aware of your beliefs and concerns.” When you receive that as a sum total reply, you know they are saying they are not going to do anything. You know it’s a refusal, proclaimed arbitrarily and not even reasoned to you. Effectively it admits already knowing that anything needs doing, and admits already not doing it.

It came from Barbara Jacobs, who you may have heard of from the book Loving Mr Spock. She answers for Autistic Intelligence. In messaging AI I had asked who was responsible for its site content, and out of their list of speakers I had guessed it might be her from the Barbara signature on the message of self-doubting crisis for AI that was the latest post in its blog section.

She had even posted there a feeling of self-doubt by AI at present and it not doing much. “We can’t put on the big conferences, because they cost our delegates more money than they have. They’re a nightmare to organise as I (Barbara) am a one-woman band, not an organisation or a ‘charity’ with tax-free status, donations, funding for overheads and some sponsorship for conferences”. So a shoestring cottage industry putting on a facade of grandeur, all along. Oh dear.

Why then does she want to damage AI and have it seen to be in the wrong towards maltreated children, aspies among them? The thing she is motivelessly refusing to do, by this rude one-liner, is – SIMPLY – SIMPLY – tell the readers of AI’s site that wronged destroyed child authors exist. That’s all! It’s so simple, it’s so easy to do. It’s just one extra fact to slip into the site.

It is made necessary by the presence on the site of a profile of Luke Jackson, as one of their list of speakers. So long as the existence of wronged child authors is not in prominent general public knowledge, an additional hammering of abused kids is done every time any autism organisation ever tells the public about a child author success, but does not also tell them that there are wronged child authors. The way AI’s site is now doing this is exceeding even the boundaries of cruelty to abused kids reached before by all the fervour around Luke back in 2002-3 . It is explicitly crediting him with winning “the TES child author award.”

There is no award called a “child author award.” In 13 years Luke’s award has never been called this by anyone before. It is directly a child abuse and child cruelty towards every kid, uncounted in number, who is suffering the ATROCITY of destruction of a child author chance by school homework or by any oppressive power behaviour of adults, and to every adult survivor of this, to credit a “child author award” to any trumpeted public figure on a pedestal without lifting a finger to say a single peep anywhere about wronged child authors. If Jacobs is aware of this she is aware it’s wrong to do it.

It is worse to do it around Luke than anyone else, for the “child author” credit is not accurate! The book he got an award for in 2003, Freaks Geeks and Asperger Syndrome, his mother Jacqui told the Times on 16 Aug 2002 was more her work. Luke denied on a now defunct forum site in 2004 that the report was accurate in its quote: that Jacqui did 6 hours’ work to every half hour Luke did, which would make the book 12/13 by the adult parent. But the fact was repeated in several profiles of them, that Luke only produced unformed unordered writings which took Jacqui’s intervention of editing and formatting to make into a book, in the case of both the books credited to him. THAT MEANS HE NEVER PRODUCED ANY BOOK WRITTEN UNAIDED AS A CHILD AT ALL !!!

(Their first short book, on GFCF diet, even contained several chapters credited to Jacqui despite bending the book’s PR by crediting only Luke as its author on the front cover.) Yet there remains a PR industry, reviving now, who it profits to make him the most feted supposed child author in history. And why do they always determine to do it completely ignoring stepping over and spitting on the cruel child abuse issue of wronged child authors? If it increases their profits to make Luke sound more outstanding by minimising the number of child authors known, by choosing not to help the wronged but to kick us all back into the gutter, then THOSE ARE BLOOD PROFITS FROM OTHER CHILDREN’S BACKS. And all the time, the answer to avoid that is utterly simple. Simply tell the public that we exist.

Simply tell their readers that we exist.

That is what AI has chosen not to do even after I stood outside its conference at Dalmuir near Glasgow on 2 Mar 2015, for 7 hours under bursts of hail and sleet, showing all-comers a placard “Jacqui Jackson events should tell you there are aspie child authors whose chance to write books was destroyed by abusive school homework – I was one.”

As I repeated in my recent contact with AI: my campaign has always acknowledged that Luke should have been allowed to put out an unaided book if he wanted to, it does not dismiss that he would have had the ability to. Raising that question is valuable because it brings him down to a level closer to where the wronged are, instead of on a pedestal. But knowing, from the forum denial, that the question is potentially hurtful to him, I had told AI: “The hurtfulness of pointing out this fact can be avoided and not done if wronged child authors get treated equitably. ” But as long as we are being oppressed and HURT by non-recognition, the campaign for our just cause must be helped and evidenced by citing available facts that help it, and that includes these public facts about the Jacksons. It follows: I’m willing civilly to wipe from this page every mention of Luke not being an unaided child author, as soon as AI puts even a brief, but of fair prominence, mention of wronged child authors onto its site.

Until then, would you want to pay to go to any of AI’s events? Knowing that it has pushed aside rudely a population group of cruelly suffering maltreated wronged kids, with neither the accountability of a stated reason, nor any logical motive?

Maurice Frank
25 May 2016

At Apr 2017: less than a year after posting the above, some of us noticed that Autistic Intelligence has vanished. No explanation to be found of why.
What a conceit by Luke Jackson, on his own blog, calling himself “world renowned” !?!?! Nobody else calls him that.